Monthly Archives: March 2013

March 12, 2013 · 1:27 pm

I like the contrast between education and schooling in this article. I often talk about it in terms of education and knowledge. When I do, I speak of education as training for a career and knowledge as training for life. They are certainly not identical

One of my favorite writers in the field of education, Alfie Kohn, asks a very important question in the title of one of his books, What Does It Mean To Be Well-Educated? George Eliot makes a claim that seems to take up this question by stating, “It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught…to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small, hungry, shivering self” (Middlemarch).

There is inherent in these two ideas this common thread: being well-educated should liberate persons from their small, hungry, shivering selves. Indeed, the intent of education should be about this very thing, so that the answer to Kohn’s question should be: being well-educated is the liberated self, enlarged by generosity, fed by virtue, and warmed by the well-being of one’s fully formed self.

This C.S. Lewis quote struck me as an fascinating explanation of human desire.

We are told to deny ourselves and to take up our crosses in order that we may follow Christ; and nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find if we do so contains an appeal to desire. If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.[1]

[1] Lewis, C. S. “Weight of Glory” in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 2001, 25-26.